Bryn Mawr
Classical Review 94.09.04

RESPONSE: Tarrant on Gerson on Tarrant (BMCR 94.03.07)

It seems more than appropriate for Platonists
to be seizing the right to respond to the failure of their writings to
produce conviction, thus answering questions on which the original book
can say nothing new. Conviction, of course, was never my intended goal,
and speculation never a charge which I shy away from; some problems are
simply too important not to be discussed. Ignoring thorny historical
issues is a kind of speculation in itself, and it is wishful
thinking to assume that what is not provable is not relevant. My book is
not slow to criticize certain kinds of speculation; if it replaces that
with another kind that 'has examined with minute attention the small
amount of material available' then I am not unhappy. The relevant material
far exceeds that which we have for certain Presocratics on whom far more
has been written.

One point that I should like to take up is the
rapidity with which Gerson dismisses my view, still held, that
Republic VII is behind the rationale for the tetralogical
arrangement. This dismissal is a natural consequence of his presumption
that it is simply the 'educational theory in book 7' that I find relevant.
My wording is partly responsible for this presumption, though the one
passage which I quote is 540a-c which deals primarily with what will
follow higher education proper: with the duties of the guardians
as educators and as political leaders. My claims arise from a discussion
of the whole 'philosophic rite', not just of Platonic education. The
vision of the Good indeed concludes the Platonic
educational process, but that vision marks the turning-point
rather
than the end of the guardian's career.

If we are to deal with the
surviving Middle Platonic reading orders we must realise that the corpus
was not seen as a body of literature for the student, but as one
which often conceals messages barely intelligible to the
philosopher-politician
himself (D.L. 3.63-64). Most of these reading-orders seem to end with
the works of relevance to the politician, and there is no hint that any of
these reading-programmes (contrast that of Iamblichus) was simply designed
to lead to a vision of the Good. The vision of the Good, even if it is the
epistemological goal, is merely a step along the road to the individual's
wider ethical/political goal.

The next thing that one must
appreciate is that for corpus-organizers who were largely 'dogmatists' it
was the so-called 'zetetic' works in the corpus that were an
embarrassment. Albinus (Prologus 6) could utilize the more
positive ones among them for 'cathartic' and 'maieutic' purposes, but saw
the polemical ones as belonging to the final stage, the second
'reinforcement' stage, long after any vision had been created. Their
position in the Thrasyllan tetralogies reflects the belief that these
are not works that teach the pupil (for they are a fortiori not
works of instruction), but works that served another purpose. The dangers
of elenctic argument are well enough spelled out by Plato
(Rep. 7.538c-539c); such argument is
inappropriate for the under-thirties, and the over-thirties are said to
prefer to model themselves on the truth-seeker rather than the more
playful and contentious arguers. Does one despair, then, of finding any
purpose for Plato's more playful and contentious works that
Republic 7 would sanction?

The guardian who has experienced
the vision is required to descend again from time to time to practical
matters, and the dangers of that descent are discussed by Plato at
517d-518b. What help might written works of Plato offer the guardian who
has to confront these problems? He needs above all techniques of dealing
with life in the cave: techniques for handling those who have not risen to
the life above themselves. I am not committed to arguing that tetralogies
IV to VII are the perfect vehicles for illustrating how some new Socrates
could indeed cope with the thoughts and aspirations of those who are as
yet spiritually blind. But I believe that a corpus-organizer could have
attributed such a role to them. Their presence in the corpus required that
a use be found for them, and this could most safely be done by allowing
them to be read by those beyond their first round of dialectical studies.
In the hands of the fully-educated they might safely serve as
illustrations of the essential processes of testing the young,
stimulating them to develop their ideas, and countering the rival claims
for their attentions made by other groups of intellectuals. Four
tetralogies composed chiefly of such works might seem too many, but their
total length amounts to only about one quarter of the Thrasyllan corpus.

Perhaps more important is the question whether Porphyry is
following Thrasyllus for a longer or for a briefer passage in his
commentary on Ptolemy's Harmonics. We are assured by Porphyry that
for as long as he uses a source here (pp. 12-15 Düring), he follows
Thrasyllus, as he is naming sources and Thrasyllus is the sole source
named. Gerson's scepticism is based on the observation that 'this logos
doctrine is in its main lines not substantially different from that of
Plotinus, Porphyry's teacher, and from Middle Platonists.' I find it odd
that Gerson can so confidently make this assertion, for the Middle
Platonist evidence is very thin if we exclude Theon (whose frequent
indebtedness to Thrasyllus is not an issue) and Philo of Alexandria (who
is not primarily a Middle Platonist, but is unquestionably a contemporary
of Thrasyllus. But if Gerson is correct, and particularly if he is
thinking of Philo here, then there should be no difficulty in
acknowledging that Thrasyllus did share 'this logos doctrine ... in its
main lines'. If I do not explain why Porphyry should have picked out
Thrasyllus as an authority on philosophic matters, that cannot alter the
fact that he chose to mention what Thrasyllus called the type of logos
which he discusses, so
that, at very least, he knew of a parallel discussion in Thrasyllus more
worthy of mention than any other parallel discussion. I do not claim that
Porphyry added or subtracted nothing, and I do not claim that he wrote
anything incompatible with his own views, but the originality of Porphyry
has frequently been questioned, and in this case he himself admits to a
lack of originality in his logos-theory (p. 13.13 = my T23.20).

I
am grateful for the observation on p.55 that Platonists had to struggle,
after Andronicus, with Aristotle's very different picture of Plato's
doctrines. My picture of Thrasyllus (p. 180) was of one who saw Plato as
an esotericist (on some matters at
least), but as an esoterist whose written meaning was observable to the
initiated. While I do not think that Plotinus took a markedly different
attitude, I agree that he is much less text-dominated. That is not true of
most of the Neoplatonists who followed, but still I agreed that they were
not much conscious of Thrasyllan influence (p. 212). My claim for
Thrasyllan influence (p. 208), as reported on p.54, must be considered
alongside the qualifications expressed in the remainder of the conclusion.
My title's apparent claim, that there exists a 'Thrasyllan Platonism', is
the claim of one who does not see Platonism (or indeed any philosophy) as
simply a collection of doctrines. Thrasyllus was at the centre of a
distinctive approach to 'doing Plato', based upon wrestling with the
corpus and moulding it into new shape; this was an important approach,
outwardly shunning originality, yet seeing the whole through spectacles of
a particular colouring.